“In light of all her losses in areas of general knowledge, it was really surprising that she had retained so much knowledge in areas in which she had expertise,” admits Landau. It seems as if some memories could be more deeply embedded in the brain.
Landau suspects that skills and knowledge may interact more closely than previously thought. She refers to a study on elite athletes by researchers at Yale and Johns Hopkins universities. The authors of that paper suggest that expert knowledge could lead to expert skills. For example, tennis players need to recall facts such as how their grip alters the racket angle or how spin affects the ball’s bounce.
Perhaps the ongoing exchange between body and mind leads to something special. This could mean there might be a specific category of memory that the brain treats differently.
Blurring The Lines
To find out more about Johnson’s cognitive abilities, Landau recently examined her recall of facts related to her former activities. Together with her colleagues Emma Gregory, Mike McCloskey, and Zoe Ovans, she tested Johnson’s knowledge of driving, flying, painting, and playing the viola and compared her to professionals and novices in those fields. Their findings were published in Cognitive Neuropsychology.
The series of tests included up to 88 questions dealing with areas in which she had expertise. The researchers asked questions such as: “When flying, how would you maneuver the aircraft to recover from a stall?” and “Where are the rudder controls located in the cockpit?” and “When playing pizzicato what do you pluck the strings with?” and “What would you do to the paper before you paint if you wanted the colors to ‘flow out?’”
The results were startling. Johnson can no longer identify well-known artworks, such as Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” Nor does she recognize Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or the tune of “Happy Birthday.” Yet she can describe in detail how to prepare a watercolor palette or explain the purpose of a viola’s bridge.
“She had a remarkable amount of knowledge, not only about performance, but also about viola bows, the properties of watercolor pigments and the details about airplane equipment,” Landau recalls. Her scores were not as high as professionals when it came to skills like flying and playing the viola. On watercolor painting, however, the former professional artist scored higher than the experts.
Their findings suggest that the division between memory types may not be as wide as it sometimes seems. “We’re not trying to question the distinction between declarative and procedural memory,” says Landau. “But it does blur the lines.”
It also reminds us how little we know about our minds. It may be tempting to think that the brain houses different types of memory within separate regions. Yet Johnson shows why this view is overly simplistic. Memories consist of sights, sounds, and other impressions that are distributed all over the brain. Information flows from one neuron to another through tiny neural connections. How memories are stored and solidified depends on changes in connectivity, a nuanced process not bound by well-defined categories.
Johnson’s case raises more questions than it answers. Yet it hints at how much we don’t yet know about memory. It also shows the impact that learning has on the brain and how the interrelationship between body and brain might help us to maintain our abilities over our lifetime.
This article was first published in Brain World Magazine’s Winter 2017 issue.
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As a professional violist, I performed in a chamber orchestra with a sue johnson. And we toured all over Europe, – lost touch with her and wonder if she could be the same sue in your article?